FIXATION AS A WESTERN OPERATING SYSTEM

Liviu Poenaru, June 21, 2025

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What if the Western world operated not through openness, but through fixation—a systematic attachment to stressors, emotions, objects, identities, and moral concepts? And what if this cultural tendency to fixate came at the expense of a more dynamic, multidimensional understanding of reality?

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In psychoanalysis, the term fixation refers to a psychic arrest in development, often around a particular object or affect. Freud (1905) originally used the term to describe libidinal investment that remains bound to a specific stage of psychosexual development. Yet the concept can be extended beyond the clinical realm to diagnose a broader cultural mechanism: the modern West appears fixated on certain values and symbolic poles that shape collective perception and identity.

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These fixations take multiple forms and operate across emotional, symbolic, and material registers. There is the fixation on objects, exemplified by the materialist imperative to own, control, and accumulate—an impulse deeply embedded in consumer culture and theorized by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects(1968). Then there is the fixation on emotions such as outrage, guilt, shame, and anxiety—affects that circulate endlessly through media, politics, and everyday life, often without symbolic resolution, as Wendy Brown discusses in States of Injury (1995). 

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We also observe a fixation on ideas—justice, freedom, identity—that have become rigid ideological battlefields, losing their openness and becoming markers of polarization, a dynamic explored in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). Additionally, we can mention the fixation on trauma, where collective wounds such as Holocaust memory or colonial guilt are compulsively repeated in public discourse rather than metabolized symbolically and culturally—a phenomenon illuminated by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996). Together, these fixations form a cultural architecture that binds thought and perception, preventing the emergence of more fluid, multidimensional engagements with the world.

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These fixations become structuring forces of identity and discourse. But they also function as perceptual traps—reifying moral polarities, simplifying complexities, and flattening the multiplicity of the world. The Western mind, in this reading, becomes addicted to stability, control, and symbolic certainty, incapable of tolerating ambiguity, fluidity, or silence.

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This narrowing of perception aligns with what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the exhaustion of the self in neoliberal societies (The Burnout Society, 2010): the contemporary subject is not simply overworked, but overstimulated by imperatives to perform, justify, and narrativize its existence. Fixation, in this sense, becomes a defensive strategy against the overwhelming openness of Being.

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Such a cultural configuration drastically reduces the field of consciousness. The human becomes entangled in compulsive loops of meaning, unable to perceive the wider relational web in which they exist. Western rationality—which historically prided itself on its universality—proves to be deeply partial, overcoded, and neurotically moralized.

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By contrast, several non-Western cosmologies and ontologies point toward more plural, dynamic, and fluid models of reality. Taoist philosophy, for instance, privileges the emptiness and spontaneity of flow (wu wei) over rigid goal-seeking. Amerindian cosmologies (Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 2014) suggest that what we call “identity” is not fixed but perspectival and relational. African and Andean epistemologies prioritize vibrational continuity with the environment, rather than opposition between subject and object (Morin, 2014).

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These models reject the Western tendency to interpret life as a theater of causes and effects. Instead, they offer a vision of the world as an energetic field, where perception, emotion, and cognition circulate rather than crystallize.

 

Such a reorientation has deep consequences for mental health, particularly in clinical settings. From this viewpoint, much of contemporary psychological suffering could be read as a pathology of fixation: anxiety as fixation on an anticipated threat, depression as fixation on a lost ideal, obsession as fixation on control. Healing, then, becomes a process of de-fixation—reintroducing movement, complexity, ambiguity, and resonance into a psyche trapped in overdetermined loops.

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To “de-fix” is to unhook psychic investments from their rigid objects, and allow for new patterns of connection. It means helping individuals and societies reconnect with the open-endedness of experience, the unknown, and the non-binary. In this sense, psychotherapy could become not just a method of healing individual suffering, but also a form of cultural detoxification—a subtle resistance against the Western cult of control and clarity.

 

This vision invites us to rediscover a wider sense of life, one that flows, resonates, and co-evolves with the world rather than fixating on it. It calls for a decolonization of attention, and a radical recalibration of what it means to perceive, feel, and know.

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 REFERENCES

Baudrillard, J. (1968). Le système des objets [The System of Objects]. Paris: Gallimard.

Brown, W. (1995). States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Han, B.-C. (2010). Müdigkeitsgesellschaft [The Burnout Society]. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

Sloterdijk, P. (1983). Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014). Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology (P. Skafish, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing.

Morin, E. (2014). La méthode: La nature de la nature. Paris: Point Essais

Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, pp. 123–243). London: Hogarth Press. 

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